Food glorious food? 3D Printed Food at TCT Asia

3D Printed Food at TCT Asia

Food printed on the XYZPrinting Food Printer

Food 3D Printing is perhaps the area of the industry that interests me least; I find it to be the most hyperbolic with least development area of 3D Printing. However, having gazed out of the office window from which I am typing this onto two booths and seen how jam packed they’ve been I decided to check out what all the fuss was about.

Throughout the three days, even now as we’re winding down, you’ve barely been able to get near either stand. It is safe to say that although this editor is more inspired by E-Nable or Made in Space it is safe to say that the populous is very much intrigued by food 3D printing.

Choc Creator V2

Choc Creator V2

Choc Edge’s Choc Creator V2 pipes chocolate onto a moving platform to create intricate, tasty patterns. One of my main concerns about 3D printing is essentially very few people care about presentation over taste; presentation is a superfluous extra for haute cuisine. However it has to be said the chocolate, which is melted before being placed in the syringe for plotting, tastes pretty nice.

XYZPrinting’s device is a whole different kettle of fish, the Kinpo group have poured investment into their XYZPrinting spin-off company and it is beginning to pay dividends. The XYZPrinting Food Printer uses three syringes with a variety of blended fresh ingredients and mixes them together to create food with decent nutritional value in novelty shapes for baking later.

Much like Natural Machines Foodini, the idea is to enable the busier person to create healthy meals from fresh ingredients with relatively little effort. I tried a savoury cheese and chive cracker in the shape of a dinosaur and while it wasn’t exactly the steak I had last night it was certainly edible.